Abstract

Modal particles (MPs) in German form a small, more or less closed set of specific lexical items that exhibit special syntactic and semantic properties that set them apart from other kinds of particles and that make them an interesting object for studying the syntax-semantics interface. In particular, they are non-truth-conditional, have wide scope, are sentence-mood-dependent, can neither receive main stress, be questioned, nor occur cannot in the so-called prefield. Using a continuation-based grammar that also employs ideas of multidimensional semantics, we show that these properties can be derived from their non-truth-conditional status.